The Daily Launches, Brings Subscription News to the iPad

Yesterday, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. announced the first subscription-based iPad app. Called The Daily, the app is designed to be essentially a newspaper for your iPad, and as long as you have an active subscription, you'll get new issues of The Daily to your iPad each day.

Yesterday, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. announced the first subscription-based iPad app. Called The Daily, the app is designed to be essentially a newspaper for your iPad, and as long as you have an active subscription, you'll get new issues of The Daily to your iPad each day. The Daily was built to be a news app for the iPad that looks and feels like a combination newspaper and magazine. The design lets you swipe through stories, photos, comics, and other news blurbs, as well as play a few games and enjoy some mini-apps while you're reading the news.

News Corp is treating The Daily very much like a newspaper, and has opened bureaus in New York and Los Angeles and a team of editors and journalists to get the project off the ground. It's available now in the iTunes App Store, and will set you back $39.99 per year after an initial 2 week free trial.

The Daily covers a range of topics, including world news, technology news, gossip and entertainment, the arts, and more. Once you have an active subscription, you'll need to download each edition every day in order to see the new content, but once you have the issue downloaded, you don't need an internet connection to enjoy it.

Perhaps one of The Daily's best features is that it was designed specifically for the iPad, as opposed to being a port from newsprint to the iPad's screen. You can view panoramic photos in full-screen just by dragging your finger around them, tap-and-zoom to expand photos, play videos in-line with their news stories, and share stories you'd like your friends to see easily on Facebook and Twitter - even if they don't subscribe to The Daily.

You can also save stories for future review and later reading, comment on stories from within the app, look up your home team's sports scores, and more. Like any good newspaper, you even get a daily crossword.

While The Daily is definitely innovative and new, and it's garnered a lot of attention, our own Lance Ulanoff, Editor-in-Chief of PCMag.com, poses the question: Do you really need it? For some people, the answer is clearly no: the Daily is missing a number of features that are important to a number of newspaper readers, like local news. For others, digital living is the way to go and The Daily is much cheaper than a subscription to the local paper.

Still, time will tell if The Daily is the first in a brave new world of subscription-based iPad and tablet-based news media. The people behind The Daily say that it'll make its way to other tablets (presumably Android-based) in the coming months, and other publishing companies have said that they're working on similar apps.